By Travis Johnson
Goldstone, Ivan Sen’s sequel to his earlier Mystery Road, has taken more money in its first week than its predecessor took in its entire theatrical run. Transmission Films’ Mathew Soulos has confirmed that the film is sitting in a total take of $420,136 at the latest count – a promising achievement in the first week of release for an Australian release. That figure takes into account the film’s opening night slot at the Sydney Film Festival, plus sneak weekend screenings, meaning that the film has virtually played for two weeks now.
In its first official week of release, Goldstone managed a per-screen take of $6000+, and with the film expanding to more screens in the coming weeks, coupled with the extremely positive reviews the film has garnered, it is on track to perform very strongly in Australia.
As Soulos noted, “That compares very favourably with the opening week for Sherpa, which took $173,489 on a comparable number of screens, and went on to become the third highest grossing Australian documentary of all time,” Mr Soulos said.
The comparison with Sherpa is spurious as the benchmarks for documentaries and feature films are poles apart, however this is still a promising start at the box office for a good local film, which is obviously resonated with audiences.
Goldstone, starring Aaron Pedersen, Jacki Weaver, David Wenham, David Gulpilil, Cheng Pei-pei, Michelle Lim Davidson and Tom E. Lewis, is in cinemas now.